What Can Evangelicals Teach Us About Beauty? - Lecture 1

This Friday Night Lecture was led by scholar and author Karen Swallow Prior, who explored the connections between art, beauty, and the evangelical tradition. This sometimes complicated relationship has important things to teach us about both art and the beautiful. She will also explore the human appetite for beauty and how it's easy to fill it with poor substitutes. One such substitute is often branded as “evangelical” art and characterized as sentimental: It might produce good feelings, but does it satisfy our desire for the beautiful?

Dr. Prior discussed these ideas and the roots and broad influence of sentimentality in evangelical art. She will invite us to consider what it means to pursue true beauty—art that inspires and transforms—even when it requires sacrifice.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph.D., is a reader, writer, and professor. Among her many publications are The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023); and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018). In addition to a monthly column for Religion News Service, her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, and The Gospel Coalition; she is also a contributing editor for Comment.

Prior’s academic focus is British literature, with a specialty in the eighteenth century, a period she loves for its emphasis on philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, community, and its efforts to correct the universal human impulse toward extremes. Learn more about Swallow Prior’s presentations and affiliations on her website.

💻 Watch this event on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/unaF8pP2k1Q

This event was recorded live at Upper House on March 14, 2025.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, good evening and welcome to the Friday Night Lecture Series at the Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation. I'm Tony Bullis, I know I've met many of you. I'm the director of New College Madison. It's one of the five initiatives at the Foundation. And if you're unfamiliar with us and the Foundation, who we are, our mission is to lead Christian thought and formation to shape the University of Wisconsin community. These lectures, I think anyway, fit very nicely into this mission as we bring in experts to discuss a big question or a big topic or a big series on or around the Christian tradition. If this is your first time at these lectures, let me give you the rundown. The evening is divided up into three short lectures, 30 minutes apiece, and there'll be time after each 30-minute lecture, 10 minutes for questions, and 10 minutes for a break and refreshments. Okay, one quick housekeeping note before we introduce the speaker tonight. If you park down below us in the fresh parking lot, uh you can validate your ticket at the front for a 50% discount. And to my right are the restrooms, uh, and there was one other thing, I'll announce it at the end. That's it. Uh it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight, Karen Swallow Pryor. She's the author of several books. I had to condense it, or we'd be here 15 minutes. Um, most recently, though, it's the evangelical imagination: how stories, images, and metaphors created a culture in crisis. That was Brazo's in 2023. And then On Reading Well, Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, also Brazos 2018. Her reading has appeared in Christianity Today, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, and various other diverse places. She completed her PhD at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Her academic focus is British literature, with a specialty in the 18th century, a period she loves for its emphasis on philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and community, as well as its efforts at correcting the universal human impulse to gravitate towards extremes, which you might hear about tonight, at least a little bit. She and her husband live on a hundred-year-old homestead in central Virginia with dogs, chickens, and of course lots of books. Will you please join me in welcoming Taryn?

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Alright, gotta make sure I can see that clock because uh I can get carried away with myself. So um so this talk is going to be drawn largely from my book, The Evangelical Imagination, which covers um quite a bit of ground. Um and so I'm going to in the first lecture kind of take us back in history a little bit. And so if it's a little dry and boring, I'm sorry, but we'll get to the to the beauty part. Oh, I have to remember to change the slides too. I I almost never use PowerPoint, but I'm like, I'm talking about beauty, I have to show some visuals. So um so bear with me while I try to remember to um press the button. Um, but you know, I spend too much time out on social media, so I'm formed in a lot of ways about uh the things that go on there. And when we were coming up with the title of this talk, What Can Evangelicals Teach Us About Beauty? You know, the jokes write themselves. And I've got a few replies like nothing, you know, or whatever, and then you know, some I can't even repeat. But anyway, so but there, you know, there is if you I you know, I'm not making any assumptions about you. I am an evangelical, so I can tell the jokes. I get to do that. Um, but if you're not evangelical, you know a lot about you know, you hear the word a lot and you know a a lot of them, probably. And so you might think too, you might not really associate evangelicals with beauty. Um and nor do I. But we'll get there, we'll get there. Okay. So uh I am an evangelical and I do care about beauty, so here is at least one example trying to to teach uh about beauty. But I think we'd it's helpful to at least start with what I mean when I'm talking about evangelicals who are evangelicals. I mean books are written about this, lots of books, um, and everyone has a different definition. And of course, the word has been you know bandied about a lot in recent headlines and political polling and so forth and such, and we won't really talk too much about that. Um but there is a movement called evangelicalism in England where it r arose in the early 18th century, it was uh more technically called the Evangelical Revival. Um and then in America the same movement was called the Great Awakening, and then there were more awakenings after that. So that's what we're talking about. We're talking about a movement that began in the first decades of the 18th century in England and also then over in America. Uh it is not a denomination, it's not based on doctrines or theology, it's not based on a lot of different things. So that is what makes it a little bit hard to pin down. Um but there is actually a definition that academics use, and I'm gonna use that. I'm sorry for that, but um academics do have some value, and one of them is to give us definitions. And being a word person, I like that. So David Bebington, who is one of the uh the world's foremost living church historians, has developed what is now called the Bebington quadrilateral. He studied evangelicalism over the course of its history. Um, it's his specialty, and most academics agree with this definition even if they you know question or push back a little bit. And so this is this is the one that I use um and I think everyone uses or at least starts from. And what he he looks at what was happening in the early um decades of the 18th century and see and continued throughout that century, continued through the 19th century, into the 20th and into the 21st century. And maybe things have changed. That's a whole other discussion. That that would take another series of several three-hour lectures. But um the Bebington Quadrilateral points to four emphases that emerged during this time and continued. And that was among Protestant Christians in first England, then America, a renewed emphasis on the Bible, right? The and the place of what the Bible has um authoritatively in the life of the believer. So that's called biblicism, and an emphasis on Christ's crucifixion on the cross for the salvation of humanity. Crucicentrism is the fancy word, but an emphasis on the Bible. And again, these are not new things, obviously. These have been in Christianity from the beginning, but a renewed emphasis on the Bible, on Christ's sacrifice, um, an emphasis on conversion. Uh, if you know anything about evangelicals, you know, we like the altar calls and all that, right? Like that moment, you know, that day, the hour, the minute you first believed and you were converted. Um we like to emphasize that. And there's a reason, I'll get into that. But so an emphasis on the need for individual conversion, so conversion, Bible, crucifixion, and then an emphasis on activism. So, of course, in the 18th and 19th centuries, we would associate activism most with missions, right? The missions movement that grew during those periods, um, abolitionism, which I'll talk about more in a minute. Um, but even today, um, evangelicals are activists. Have you noticed? I mean, we just love our causes. And this is true of left and right, Republican and Democrat. I mean, evangelicals just have a spirit of activism, wanting to change the world, wanting to uh convert people, wanting to evangelize. Those are all ways that the spirit of activism is expressed among evangelicals within the movement. Again, whether this is takes place within the Church of England, there were people who remained Anglicans but became evangelical. There were those who left the church, were outside the the established church and became evangelicals. And again, this this helps us to understand that the evangelical revival arose in a moment in a time in time when the Protestant Reformation was a couple hundred years old. I'm not good at the math, but something like that. Um and there arose, had ri arisen in England a state church, like Christian nationalism essentially. And so at that time, to be uh born into England, be to be born in England, unless you were, you know, came from some other minority population, which was very, very minority. If you were born in England, you were an English citizen and you were a member of the church. Right? And so belief and Christianity were just sort of assumed. Does this sound fam familiar today? Like it that's there are certain places where it, you know, almost to be American means you're a Christian, or some people would have it that way. So it kind of makes sense in the broad strokes of of history that and are that some Christians would see a need to re-emphasize these central tenets of the faith. The importance of God's word, the importance of Christ's crucifixion, the importance of individual conversion. Just because you're born into a Christian family or you know, or uh born into a Christian church as an infant doesn't make you a Christian. Um and we are to tell the world about it, to evangelize and to go out into the world. Um and so that's what evangelicalism is. Now, if I we again link it to something that had already taken place, which was the Protestant Reformation, then we know that there was also, had always been since the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, an emphasis on the word. Okay, letters, God's word, written, reading it, all of those things. Uh, and there has always been a tension since the Reformation between a word-centered expression of faith and an image-centered expression of faith. And words and images are sometimes seen in tension or understood to be in tension with one another. Um, you know, I'm Protestant too, so I can, you know, I have that bias toward the word and toward, you know, having the word at the center of worship and the center of life, but I'm also kind of creative and artistic, so I like the images too. So I struggle with this tension. Um, and so I want to lay this foundation because I want to say that there are reasons deeply rooted in Protestant theology and then kind of repeated in evangelicalism. Uh, there is a bias maybe against images and imagination and more toward the written word. Um, and so the first image that I have up here, which I haven't forgotten so far, yay, is um a medieval, it's a detail from a medieval painting. Uh it is not, you know, this is way before the Reformation and way before evangelicalism. But what I want you to notice in this, so this is a it's a picture of the uh, I think it's called the Annunciation, is from the uh, it's in the, let's see, somewhere here. Oh yes, it's the 15th century. Um it's the nativity, not the annunciation, of course. Um, and so the figure is we have a figure of Joseph holding the baby. And what is Mary holding? She's holding a Bible or the Word, right? So here we have a pre-Reformation, pretty Catholic image of Mary holding the word, you know, because she did hold the word in her womb in her arms. Um, and I I don't believe they had, you know, a lot of printed Bibles when Mary, when Jesus was born. I don't, they didn't have any, okay. Um so it's very anachronistic, right? But but the artists of the 15th century, and there are many, many paintings like this throughout art history. This is just this is just one, it's not, it's not an anomaly. Many paintings show Mary as a reader holding the word. So even before the Reformation, even before evangelicalism, there is a centrality of the word, and yet what we see here is this image that's it's very metaphorical and symbolic, right? Because she's holding a literal text, the Bible. Um, but that uh a person of that time would understand it's the word, it's it's and that's who Jesus is, the word. And so there isn't necessarily our literal understanding of this painting the way that we might come to it today. Um, so let's see. I'm checking the time here. All right. So so evangelicalism comes about as kind of a re-emphasis on what the Protestant Reformation emphasized and kind of got lost in all the brew ha ha of having a state church. Woo-hoo! Um, that was a lot of fun, not really. Okay. Um so just ask the people burned at the stake and beheaded. Um so and then there's were a couple of other main influences that brought about evangelicalism. The Reformation had had gone had had passed by, and then the Puritans arose, right? The Puritans were an English sect who thought that the Protestant Reformation had not purified the church sufficiently of its Catholic history and tradition. So that's where their name came from. They wanted to purify the church. And um, and the whole history of of how the English church was made, we know, is was is is messy and didn't really have much to do with doctrine anyway. It had to do with heirs to the throne and marriage and divorce and annulment and all that. Um, and so there's a Puritan influence that leads to the rise of evangelicalism. And then from over in another part of Europe and Germany, there's a pietist influence. So Pietism is a movement that grew out of Lutheranism, another expression of Reformation theology, um, that combines an emphasis on biblical doctrine or the word with an emphasis on individual piety and holiness. So, you know, individual morality. So you have this sort of anti-Catholic, let's purify the church of its remaining Catholic trappings, with this emphasis on individual holiness and piety, and evangelicals arise and we kind of carry forth both of those. Um, and so we do, even to this day, tend to emphasize uh personal piety or morality, you know, even if it's just talking about it, um not exemplifying it, but we we we have this emphasis like that's the most important thing. That's why we like to talk about the sins that individuals commit as opposed to the sins that communities and generations carry forward, but that's another subject. Okay. So we've got the Puritan influence, the pietistic influence, the Protestant hovering in the background. And then we have this thing. I hope you're not bored yet. It's a lot of history. I'm not even a historian, but I just can't really think about literature and art without kind of having the big picture. I like the big picture. Um, then we have this crazy thing that happened in the 17th century called the Enlightenment, right? It changed the world. The Enlightenment, as we all know, is you know, with the scientific revolution took place and brought about the Enlightenment and brought shone light on the on what was then called the Dark Ages, but we don't call it that anymore because it wasn't as dark as people like to say. But anyway, so the Enlightenment emphasized this kind of scientific mindset, this materialist mindset. And it also emphasized individual experience. Now, not necessarily hi. Oh, wait, wait, wait, okay, is everything good? All right, okay. Um, so the Enlightenment emphasizes individual experience, not in the subjective woo-woo way we might think of today, although it's not necessarily uh unrelated, but really if you think about a scientist conducting an experiment, an experiment and experience are etymologically connected, you know, he's doing this thing, he's observing, he's watching, he's saying, Is it, you know, is it true if I drop this apple that it will fall to the ground? I mean, and he's basing his conclusions on experiment and experience. And so there's a sense in which the individual experience becomes uh primary, not just what you've been told by tradition or what you've been told by some external objective authority, but rather your own experience of it. And of course, the Enlightenment emphasized reason. Um, in fact, we could, you know, paint the major sort of epochs of history of pre-modern and modern and postmodern by saying that what modernity was was a replacement of religion as kind of the basis for everyone's worldview, not just Christians, with reason. Reason kind of ascended to the throne, and that, so the Enlightenment brought that shift from the pre-modern age to the modern age. So there's a so all this to say that evangelicalism arose in this very particular moment in history, not coincidentally. It really is very much a tradition or a religious expression of the Enlightenment, because it is, you know, emphasizing reading in scripture and it's emphasizing experience or experiment and emphasizing reason and individual understanding, including individual conversion and and confirmation of conversion. Um and we can those are all like things that are are good, but also can can go can go wrong, can go badly. Um maybe we'll get to that part too, but you don't have to think too hard. And so um so with the emphasis on reason and sort of doctrine and logic and truth, and again, these are I'm speaking in very sweeping terms, but there arose too a kind of suspicion of faith, of course, that wasn't rooted in reason or imagination, mystery, and of all things, fiction. Okay. So now the next one. All right. So one of the first, you know, really we could call him an evangelical or proto-evangelical, but he was a Puritan. Uh the first literary artist um among the Puritans was John Bunyan, um, who wrote the what is still considered to be the most published work in all of anything ever published, second only to the Bible. Uh, and so he in 1678 published this famous work called The Pilgrim's Progress, um, in which he, you probably know the story. I don't want to give any spoilers, but you know, it's really it he he progresses through the Christian life after having his conversion and makes his way to the celestial city after encountering many figures who are allegories or symbols for different temptations, different kinds of characters we might meet in life. Probably one of my favorites is Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and he is just like that. Uh, worldly wise, but uh blind to the faith. And so The Pilgrim's Progress is one of the great works of world literature. It is one of the greatest. I'll be doing a little journey of it with readers through my Substack in coming week, so feel free to join along. I can tell you more about that later. But um, it also is notoriously today kind of boring for a lot of people. You know, it's just I and and I say this because it's it's because this at on at on the surface level, it seems very simple. Like, oh, um the main character's name is Christian, and his wife's name is Christiana, and he, you know, enters the, you know, the the goes through I can't even remember all the names, but Mr. Worldly Wiseman, the giant despair, all of these characters, they are symbols, and they literally represent what their names say. But beneath the surface, it really is a lot more complicated. There's a lot of theology and even human psychology in in what happens. And so if you go a little bit beneath the surface, it is a very, very ingenious work. Um, and not j I say this not just as a Christian, but really, I mean, liter it is in the literary. Canon where it belongs because it is such an important work of literature. And the reason I bring it up, well, there are lots of reasons I bring it up, but one reason I bring it up is because Bunyan also kind of embodies the stereotypical Puritan skepticism toward fiction, you know, towards artfulness or imagination. Now, the irony is that he wrote one of the most imaginative, brilliant works in all of literature, as I've said. And another irony, which I'll get to in a minute, but I'll just drop it here as well, is that despite his aversion to and his sort of caution against fiction, the Pilgrim's Progress is actually one of the works that that was most influential in bringing about the English novel in the next century. So there's a little irony there. But um I want to read to you. So so so Pilgrim's Progress is written in prose, so not poetry. It's an allegory. Bunyan is so adamant that we know what he's trying to say, that he actually puts glosses on the side to make sure we get the point, which is actually really helpful. It's very nice of him. But he really wants to make sure we understand what he is trying to say. But not only does he do that, but he has a preface that is written in poetry. He really was a brilliant writer. And it in this long, it takes up several pages, I guess, in most editions, and I just have a few lines I'm going to read here. But he actually includes a defense of himself for writing this story because Puritans didn't like fiction. Fiction, fiction is a lie, right? It's not the truth, it's a lie, and so they're and Satan is a father of lies, so that's that. Done deal, was essentially their view. Um I, you know, the Puritans, I'm not making fun of the Puritans really have a richer, more complex history than we understand, but I'm just giving, I'm just telling you this part that this is true. So Bunyan includes a poem as sort of a preface to his work, defending his decision to write something that wasn't true by because he's saying that he it's not fiction, it's allegory. So the so the symbols really do point to truth, which is what allegory does. So he was right. But he's the the point that I want you to see is that he he really felt the need to defend himself against using his imagination. And by the way, his wonderful um conversion narrative, his spiritual autobiography published earlier, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Like you would not even recognize this guy if you just trafficked in the stereotypes about him. He was he was very imaginative and very anxious and very intense, very emo, um, as the kids would say. And so that book is filled with, I mean, he he just he had a very intense imagination. Um it would must have been hard to be a Puritan when you had that kind of imagination. And so uh I would highly commend that book as well. Um, but I'm just gonna read a few lines from his poem where he talks about, you know, defends why he's using this art. And by the way, art, um I, you know, my specialty is 18th century, and the 18th century is really all about like binary categories. Um and um, and so you so you can learn a lot about what something is by what it isn't, and in the 18th century and even earlier, um a lot of talk about art is placed against nature. So art and nature are kind of like seen as opposed to one another, but they they should reflect one another. Um and it's really if you if you read any of this stuff from 17th and 18th century, which I hope you will, um, you know, art, the word art is just the shortened form, well, the art of the word artificial comes from the same word. So artificial is all is etymologically connected to art. So if you think of, you know, art is the opposite of nature, because art is something that's is human-made, it's artificial. And so that's where it its connection to kind of lies and pretense and fiction is. It's like it's art. You know, you can think of other words like artful, um, architecture. I mean, there are lots of words that come from it, but really artificial is the word I think that helps us understand some of the suspicion toward art because it's not real, it's not natural, it's not made by God, it's made by fallen human beings. So um, okay, I'm just gonna get to this uh few lines from uh Bunyan's preface to The Pilgrim's Progress. Why? He now he again he's imagining he's he's answering objections to him writing in this artful way. Why? What's the matter? It is dark. What though? But it is feigned. What of that, I trow? Some men by feigned words as dark as mine make truth to spangle and its rays to shine. But they want solidness. Speak, man, thy mind. They drown the weak. Metaphors make us blind. Solidity indeed becomes the pen of him that writeth things divine to men. But must I needs want solidness, because by metaphors I speak? Were not God's laws, his gospel laws, in olden times held forth by types, shadows, and metaphors? Yet yet loath will any sober man be to find fault with them, lest he be found for to assault the highest wisdom. No, he rather stoops and seeks to find out what by pins and loops, by calves and sheep, by heifers and by rams, by birds and herbs, and by the blood of lambs, God speaketh to him. And happy is he that finds the light and grace that in them be. So God uses metaphors in his words, so we can use metaphors as well, which is ultimately what fiction is. But allegory is very literally metaphor. So that helped his case a little bit. Um, okay, and so then uh around the same time, not necessarily linked to evangelicalism, but still at the same time, arose another movement, pretty short-lived, but it was very influential, called the Cult of Sensibility. Okay, so this was a little a movement around the middle of the 18th century. So remember, evangelicals are starting in the early um decades of the 18th century, rising to prominence and influence by the end of the 18th century. And in the middle, the cult of cell uh of sensibility arose that elevated the ability of a person to be sensible, or rather, the word we would use today really that means the closest thing would be emotional, like to be sensitive to something. So if so, if you were sensitive to or emotional about affecting situations, especially suffering, then you were a virtuous person if you could be influenced. Now, today we have the word empathy. It didn't exist then. Don't let me start out on empathy because it's a perfectly fine thing, despite what some people are saying. But um it but there the the cult of sensibility almost became a parody of itself because it was just like if you could show that you were visibly moved by something, then you were a very deep and uh virtuous person. Um and this is actually the very thing that Jane Austen is satirizing in her early novel Sense and Sensibility, wherein the the word sense means basically reason, like common sense, and sensibility is this kind of sensibility. And if you've read it, or even if you watch the film, you know, like Eleanor is all sense, she's all cold rationalism, and Marianne is all emotion, and then by the end they kind of figure, oh, we need a little bit of each other, balance each other out, right? Um, that's really what the novel's about. It's so good, it really is good. But um this idea that we can we can demonstrate our morality or our virtue by being sensitive, um contributes to what I guess I'll probably get to in the second uh lecture is the the sentimentality that we see in a lot of art, um, not just evangelical art, but a lot of evangelical art, this idea that bringing out the emotions. Um and there's sort of an urban legend that goes around about the cult of sensibility, and it's it really probably is an urban legend. I don't think it really happened, but it's it it's the image of like the the wealthy um aristocrat who's gone into the theater and watched the play, and I don't know what happens on the stage, but whatever it is, it makes her cry and weep because it's so sad. Um, but in the meantime, her servant is outside like holding the horse in the rain and getting wet and cold, and she doesn't really care because she's just so emotionally moved by the acting going on on the stage. That's sort of what the cult of sensibility uh turned into, and and it wasn't long-lasting. Um, but it did develop this sensitivity toward suffering, um, in kind of in reaction against an age that for a long time really wasn't that sensitive to other people's suffering. Uh and so that was happening in the meantime. So yeah, I did find this. I'm not really familiar with this. Um oops, that's the wrong this uh I might have to go kick there. It is okay. So this is like a paint. This woman, she's like the the plant, the mimosa plant is like quivering and wavering like in front of her. I don't know why it's like, but this is like a picture of of of some a woman who's supposed to represent sensibility. So um you can see that it was kind of ridiculous. Okay.